Not so much "arbitrary", more a "guide". There are more factors involved than just wishlist votes, among them where did the votes come from. For instance, if someone on the forum organises a giveaway in exchange for votes for a certain game, that might reduce the value of those votes in GOG's eyes. Some people vote for a game out of some misguided loyalty towards a developer, even though they have the game on Steam or Humble already and have no intention of buying the game on GOG.

I'll give you a classic example: Cave Story+. It has (as of now) 1788 votes on the wishlist. It owes many of those votes to Barry_Woodward constantly organising giveaways and posting new threads about it. Had there been no such campaigning, it probably would have barely broken the three-digit threshold. Not to mention that many people in the comments there openly state that they have the game from indie bundles and on Steam already. In fact, I don't think there's a single indie game on that list that's broken the 2000 vote barrier. Everything from 2000 votes is AAA/mainstream. That's what sells.

There are hundreds if not thousands of indy games coming out these days. I sometimes scratch my head at GOG's curation but the alternative would be an all-consuming flood of mostly crap.

That's more true than one might expect. GOG has publicly stated in the forums that giveaways or other mechanisms designed to coerce people into voting for a game does indeed devalue that game's wishlist score value and that they do take note of this when determining the perceived demand for a game. That probably affects prioritization more than any yes/no decision about trying to get a game in the first place though. Anything that artificially inflates demand like this will be noticed and likely not have the effect that the inflater intended. What's sad is that in many if not most cases the people doing the inflating do not realize that they're essentially gaming the system and causing more harm to the cause than good. A better way for people to go about it would be perhaps to say something more like:

"This is not required to enter my giveaway but here are a number of games to check out which you might be interested in. If you think they look cool and you might be interested in buying them if they were to come to GOG, consider voting for them on the GOG wishlist:
<links to trailers, articles, websites, whatever for various games>
<links to GOG wishlist entry for each game>"

This way they're not saying "vote for this game whether or not you care about it, and magically get a chance to win a game" which harms the system with artificially inflated votes for games nobody may actually care about, but instead it encourages people to look at trailers and game details and decide for themselves if they like it and possibly vote for it if they do.

This is a generic comment not directed at anyone but just generalizing. If people want to increase the interest in a given game in others and do so in a positive and encouraging way that means something it would be better to point people to information resources on the games in question like I said above. Game trailers, developer interviews, game websites and other promotional materials, gameplay videos on youtube and encourage people to have a look at them and decide for themselves, but never to make entering a contest contingent on voting for any games and to explicitly state that voting is not required nor expected. Be as neutral as possible. Let the games videos and other materials stand up on their own to sell the game, don't try to forge the popularity beyond what it really is - work to increase the popularity by helping passionately market the game by sharing info about it to try to garner interest - but also doing it in a way that is not deemed a spammy nuisance also.

I agree with your assessment though and I can't see GOG welcoming bucketfulls of non-selling indie shovelware here just because there are a small vocal minority of people who evangelize the particular game(s) who are upset it isn't getting the attention they want them to have. There may be the odd exception from time to time but the exceptions do not make the rule. Also, sometimes GOG re-evaluates past decisions over time and changes their minds based on overwhelming feedback too. I think "Braid" and "Meridian: Squad 22" are two examples of this in recent memory.

Mind you I think they should sometimes do the reverse too and re-evaluate some decisions of games they did bring here that they should remove and reject post-facto, like No Man's Sky and that "DRM-free Edition" indie board game that's getting the shit kicked out of it lately. :)

Because GOG ...or any game company....can't afford to offer every game that comes along,,,particulary in this age of "Shovelware"...badly desgined quickie games designed to cash in on more successful games. For every Indie game of merit, there are Ten POS "Indie" game whose only purpose is to make a quick buck.
I am not saying that GOG is right in every call as to what to sell and what not to sell that they make,but they have to make the calls.
I am amused by so many comments in this thread by people who hae no idea of the relaities of the game business.

GOG only seems to accept games which sells a lot , has good popularity aka promoted by youtube noobs. They are not interested in games that might be good as long as its popular and sells a lot they are in.

Yeah, I just assumed this forum would be dead if people didn't have jobs :D

Steam will release just about any garbage out there.

They have no quality control.

I bought a game called Binary Domain on Steam which looks real good but it does not work on Windows 8 despite the requirements saying that it can work on WIndows 8.

Games released on GOG are quality controlled so you know they are not garbage and will work on your pc.

Definitely not always the case, No Man's Sky being a recent example for instance where there was a whole group of people incapable of playing the game till a patch came out a week later.

As for Binary Domain, I don't see Windows 8 mentioned anywhere in it's requirements? (granted, it's not clear it doesn't work on OS'es higher than Windows 7 since it only mentions 7, Vista, XP) (Edit: Capable of working on both 8 and 10 if you want to believe the forum)

Some users ran it on win 8 , running it as admin + win 7 compatibility mode (granted since win 8 isn't listed, it may not work). I looked a bit tn the sub-forum , because i was surprised he/she mentioned win8 listed as working operating system on the gamecard. The game isn't so old (2012) , so i don't think it's impossible to run it on windows 8.

I actually think the release is linked to GOG's efforts to get The Witness on board, which I would assume was likely to have been GOG's bigger focus. My guess was that GOG didn't want Braid here after it being bundled and discounted so much, but JoBlow wouldn't sell The Witness here without it.

As for Meridian: Squad 22, I'm not entirely sure that what was reported is entirely truthful. Squad 22 came out of Steam Early Access on 11 August, the GOG version came out less than four weeks later. The claims that GOG hadn't got back to them came just a few days before the game went gold. Does someone really want to tell me that contact was made, negotiations were concluded, the DRM-free version went gold, contracts were signed and installers were built and tested in the space of 26 days? Possible, but unlikely. My own experience is that making contact, negotiations and getting the contracts drawn up take at least a month in themselves.

Makes you realise that some devs might not necessarily always tell us the whole truth, and that a rejection might be wholly and solely the fault of the developer's actions.

Quality control doesn't mean that poor games won't make it through the filter. Goodness knows we have a lot of turds here (Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods, Slender: The Arrival), but on the whole, the games sold here are at least of merchantable quality, and GOG at least has a grip on the shovelware problem, neither of which can be claimed about Steam, which releases an average of 4-5 games a day, 95% of which are tacky mobile ports, "My First Unity Project" titles, rushed RPGMaker games, poorly written visual novels, poorly developed hidden object games, and most recently VR proof-of-concept titles. Oh, and countless Early Access titles, the vast majority of which are unlikely to ever be finished (and in many cases, even when the EA tag is removed, the game often barely qualifies as "merchantable").

Pick up one of Indie Gala's Hump Day, Monday or Friday bundles, or one of Groupees' Greenlight bundles, and you pretty much have a representative cross-section of 95% of what is released on Steam. The remaining 5% consists of the indie titles that do make it to GOG, or AA/AAA titles which don't.

The main reason why both OP games were rejected, is probably the fact that both are episodic. When the first one was released GOG still didn't accept episodic games, and even now, they only do it for very successful games that they are really confident will be finished.

I'm a backer of the second & final episode of The Adventures Of Bertram Fiddle and I still hope it will eventually be released here upon completion. The second one is another point & click adventure that looks nice, although the first episode didn't get good reviews.

It could also be due to the fact that every time a P&C gets released here, a bunch of whiners complain, because they don't like the genre and selfishnesh seems to be spreading around the place. Because GOG is nowadays seldom releasing P&C, except for the publisher ones (daedalic & wadjet eye).


To me this was more a case of using a game to sprout all frustations by the curation system. Mainly because of the graphics. Which I don't understand at all, as 140 graphics look very carefully designed. If they were just bad, the game wouldn't have been described as a hipster piece of shit around these place.

Funny example, as is the least indie game of any indie game around here, with sony behind them pushing it. Just like Double Fine, Obsidian or Larien games are also indie games, but are more AA games that real indies.
And now everyone complains, but the thread complaining about the game not being here on release and why would have been interesting.
That's because steam releases more than 50 new games a week. Maybe 10 of those are good or interesting. Some weeks more, some weeks less. Unfortunately, we get a lot less new games than those 10, so we are missing a lot of games. Each week.

(And, no; it doesn't matter the amount of pixel-art haters around these parts and how much they sprout their bullshit. Except for the rpg-maker games, pixel art games normally require someone custom making the pixel art. Most of the really awful releases on Steam are unity 3d games using existing assets).

If you feel games like those aren't getting enough votes, maybe you should go on the forums here and try to drum up some attention for them. Post some previews or let's play videos and ask the community to vote for them.

Oh, so you think people who are into AAA games are lesser gamers than you? That's an arrogant attitude. Different people have different interests, there's no need to be an elitist prick about yours. Maybe more people would want to play Seasons After Fall or the Turing Test if fans like you actually talked about what makes said games good instead of insulting the perceived majority by implying that they aren't gamers. I personally play indies and AAA games, I think that goes for the majority of GOG users. I would rather support a really good indie game than a AAA title, simply because indie developers are more at risk of financial troubles, but I don't think indie games are inherently better than AAA games. In fact, I've played a lot more shitty indie games and met a lot more shitty indie game fans.